Some Enchanted Weekend

The talk in town today was all about the previous evening's surprise thunderstorm. The weather forecast missed it completely, and unless you were privy to the very rare yet very boisterous lightning, thunder and deluge, you might have woken up the next day and doubted its passage. At my house, we stood on the deck getting supremely drenched, drunk on Jack Daniels and a day's worth of beer and Bloody Caesar's at King Edward Bay Beach. In an attempt to photograph the ball, fork and sheet lightning that ripped through the sky, I snapped at least 60 frames of darkness as the delay on my Blackberry camera made it almost impossible to take a good picture. I did, however, manage to nail one just as the sky was electrified by the neon blue of a giant sheet of light way up in the clouds.

Unfortunately for Frank Patt and all the people who worked hard to organize the Barney Bentall concert on the golf course, the tempest arose just before the music was to start, and so, unprepared for rain, the festivities were literally washed out. No small consolation for those stuck in the downpour was the wide angle view afforded by the golf course's open vista of the light show put on by Mrs. Nature. We had been planning to head off to the event when the rain started, and so narrowly missed being soaked out there as opposed to remaining within arm's reach of dry clothes and shelter.

Bowen's perfect summer weather kept us at the beach much longer than we'd planned to stay - the water was clear and warm, and we swam so much we were in danger of dissolving. Fortified with ice cold beer and I-tunes, we migrated repeatedly from shore to sea, dogs a-plenty providing entertainment with sticks and balls.

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It has been an eerie, spooky year on Bowen.

Perhaps the harbinger of things to come should have been the strange light in the air the day before Lance died. A forest fire in Goldbridge had impbued the air with dissipated smoke, which cast the sun in a flat orangy glare in the middle of the day, and its diminished warmth created the irreconcilable actuality of a hazy chilly day.

It was that night that Lance, under circumstances that best remain private, lost his life prematurely and unnecessarily. The subdued atmosphere in the town among the locals lasted for nearly an entire week afterward, as if even those who weren't acquainted with him curbed their summer exuberance in observation of his passing. Litte did anyone know at the time that this was going to be merely the first volley from the ship of fate across the bows of the ship of Bowen.

Curiously, remarkably dry and warm weather by coastal standards has come with a coincident collection of minor disasters. Terminal Creek ran dry, threatening the success of the hatchery's produce for the year, and necessitating the commissioning of a pump to lift water over the dam at trout lake into the stream.

Despite what certainly appeared to be unanimous popular disparagement for the idea, the school lawn was largely destroyed to be replaced by some supposedly "eco-friendly" recylable fill rendered from coconut and cork. Why did the grass need replacing again? Who drove this decision in apparent disregard for the democratic process?

The second senseless tragedy took the life of a young nineteen year old boy. Car flipped, driver lives. His best friend, the passenger, dies. I'm starting to feel sick.

The tug-of-war that is the evolution, or rather, the absence of evolution, on the Cape Roger Curtis Project continues satisfy the meddlesome inclinations of parties both for and against development of the project on varying scales. The developers have hired themselves a bunch of lobbyists thinly disguised as urban planners to purchase the professional opinion they need to give them the mantle of third party endorsement they think will help fleece Bowen Islanders of a major ecological inheritance.

With the annual reality of diminished precipitation and subsequent water system recharge under-performance, any discussion of a development that will bring at least several hundred new straws into the limited aquifer resources of the island is ill advised and just plain dumb. Never mind the increased pressure on scant traffic infrastructure, ferry and other transportation resources. And lets not forget about the growing population reaching critical mass sufficient to attract the rapacious wandering eye of culture killers like Starbucks, Burger King, McDonalds, Home Depot, and their spiritual leader, WalMart.